3 Poems

There are three poems that seem to define my moods through life, words that I hear in my head so often I know them by heart. The first, by Susan Coolidge, expresses what I feel in the morning, be it a real or a symbolic one, when I get up to face life again and again, the color of my incurable and returning optimism and endurance:

New Every Morning

Every day is a fresh beginning,
Listen my soul to the glad refrain.
And, spite of old sorrows
And older sinning,
Troubles forecasted
And possible pain,
Take heart with the day and begin again.

Then there is the moments of giving up, when I'm tired, exhausted, drained, and all I feel like is closing my eyes in the dark and fall into oblivion, forever. Then it's the second poem, the melancholic words by Christina Rossetti:

When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head,
Nor shady cypress tree:
Be the green grass above me
With showers and dewdrops wet;
And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget.

I shall not see the shadows,
I shall not feel the rain;
I shall not hear the nightingale
Sing on, as if in pain:
And dreaming through the twilight
That doth not rise nor set,
Haply I may remember,
And haply may forget.

And then there is the in between, the poem that expresses my stupid self ever since I first read it at 15, and that is still as true now as then, so like me that I was amazed Fernando Pessoa should have described me so accurately (but later I understood that is the gift of truly great writers and poets):

Tudo que faço ou medito
Fica sempre na metade
Querendo, quero o infinito.
Fazendo, nada é verdade.

Que nojo de mim me fica
Ao olhar para o que faço!
Minha alma é lúdica e rica,
E eu sou um mar de sargaço —

Um mar onde bóiam lentos
Fragmentos de um mar de além...
Vontades ou pensamentos?
Não o sei e sei-o bem.

And then, there a 4th poem, one that I always associate to one person, to something I once had but seems now so far away that it looks like it was another life, or a dream, that I feel I'm not worthy to remember since I blew it so utterly and miserably. And yet... there was a time the words of Emily Dickinson evoke, sometimes painfully but always with a nostalgic sweetness that makes me think maybe I wasn't that worthless all the time:

Is it too late to touch you, Dear?
We this moment knew —
Love Marine and Love terrene —
Love celestial too —

The Father and Son Road Show, de Sherman Alexie

Nunca tinha encontrado um poema que falasse de diálise...

The Father and Son Road Show


The doctor tells me my father's story,
How he'll die if he stops dialysis.
"First confusion, followed by lethargy,
Then toxins shut off the brain." I hate this

Doctor and his certainty, though I wish
I could hate my father and his weakness.
Of course, I'm lying. Most days, I would kiss
This doctor as he tends the sugar-soaked mess

My father has made of his life. I confess
To loving my father, a gentle man
Whose brutal thirsts have left us all bereft,
And so bereft, I'm to give a command

Performance—a road show, a song and dance—
And convince my father to continue
Dialysis, no matter how he's planned
To die or not die. I don't have a clue

How to begin this time, though I've rescued
My endless father endlessly, traveled
Two thousand miles to buy him a shoe
To fit his amputated foot. Unraveled

By the simple act of living, marveled
By the mundane, my father mowed the lawn
Like van Gogh painted and spread free gravel
On the driveway like God created dawn.

God, how often I woke to find him gone,
Fleeing the children he loved and could not feed,
As if leaving made magic, a spell-song
That conjured fruit, milk, bread, fish, egg, and seed.

Come back, come back, I child-cried, I need
My father to return. Now, a father
Of two open mouths (and souls) who need me,
I'm a primitive: I hunt and gather;

I build totems and pyramids; I'm fur
And claw; I believe animals can talk;
I know the world is flat; I'm the cur
Raised by wolves; I worship corn, leaf, and stalk;

A child of the sun, I've learned to walk
Upright but still run on all fours; afraid
Of the dark and fire, in love with rock
And fire, I huddle alone in caves

And pray to my ten thousand gods; I pray
To my father's ten thousand gods; I pray
To my sons' twenty thousand gods; and I pray
For protection, courage, and strength to stay

With my father as he chooses the way
This machine will help him live or not live,
As father and father-son separate,
Loose, broken, dissolved by dialysis.

Aubade, de Phlip Larkin

I work all day, and get half drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
- The good not used, the love not given, time
Torn off unused - nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never:
But at the total emptiness forever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says no rational being
Can fear a thing it cannot feel, not seeing
that this is what we fear - no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no-one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

Begin Again - A Poem of Hope, by Susan Coolidge

Every day is a fresh beginning,
Every day is the world made new;
You who are weary of sorrow and sinning,
Here is a beautiful hope for you-
A hope for me and a hope for you.

All the past things are past and over,
The tasks are done and the tears are shed;
Yesterday’s errors let yesterday cover;
Yesterday’s wounds, which smarted and bled,
Are healed with the healing which night has shed.

Yesterday now is a part of forever,
Bound up in a sheaf, which God holds tight;
With glad days, and sad days and bad days which never
Shall visit us more with their bloom and their blight,
Their fullness of sunshine or sorrowful night.
Let them go, since we cannot relieve them,
Cannot undo and cannot atone;
God in His mercy, receive, forgive them;
Only the new days are our own,
Today is ours, and today alone.

Here are the skies all burnished brightly,
Here is the spent earth all reborn,
Here are the tired limbs springing lightly
To face the sun and to share the morn,
In the chrism of dew and the cool of dawn.

Every day is a fresh beginning;
Listen, my soul, to the glad refrain,
And, spite of old sorrow and older sinning,
And puzzles forecasted and possible pain
Take heart with the day, and begin again.

Because I could not stop for Death, by Emily Dickinson

Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.
We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labor, and my leisure too,
For his civility.

We passed the school, where children strove
At recess, in the ring;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.

Or rather, he passed us;
The dews grew quivering and chill,
For only gossamer my gown,
My tippet only tulle.

We paused before a house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,
The cornice but a mound.

Since then 'tis centuries, and yet each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses' heads
Were toward eternity.

Do not go gentle into that good night, by Dylan Thomas

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Uma citação de Natália Correia

Não Antero meu santo não me mato.
Antes me zango até ficar um cacto.
Quem me tocar (maldito) que se pique!

Tantas vezes me identifico com estas palavras!

Um amigo ofereceu-me a fotobiografia de Natália Correia. Fiquei a conhecer bem melhor a personagem e a sua obra, e se já a respeitava e por ela sentia alguma admiração, o meu respeito aumentou, sobretudo pela qualidade da sua escrita, por vezes barroca e excessiva, mas com poemas de grande beleza e sobretudo com uma força anímica e uma energia invulgares. Lembro-me em miúdo de a achar uma figura um tanto caricatural e divertida, e de facto era uma mulher com um certo excesso de energia e paixão que a levou a dizewr e fazer muitas coisas com as quais não concordo e de que não gosto, com alguma tendência ao exagero, mas é inegável que foi uma personagem, corajosa, inteligente, brilhante e marcante. De certa forma, imagino-a mais integrada na sociedade romântica, uma outra George Sand. Mas deixou-nos pérolas inesquecíveis, uma das quais, cujo impacto delicioso bem recordo na altura, é o poema que em minutos escreveu na Assembleia durante os debates da lei de despenalização do aborto:

"O Acto Sexual é para fazer filhos" - disse ele
Já que o coito - diz Morgado -
Tem como fim cristalino,
preciso e imaculado
fazer menina ou menino;
e cada vez que o varão
sexual petisco manduca,
temos na procriação
prova de que houve truca-truca.
Sendo pai só de um rebento,
lógica é a conclusão
de que o viril instrumento
só usou - parca ração! -
uma vez. E se a função
faz o órgão - diz o ditado -
consumada essa excepção,
ficou capado o Morgado.

One Art, de Elizabeth Bishop

One Art

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.



A arte de aceitar as perdas foi uma das conquistas mais inestimáveis que fiz na vida... Facilita tanto as coisas! (E o poema é lindo)

Separation

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.

(Um poema que me tocou particularmente, conciso e elegante como um haiku. Não conhecia William S. Merwin, o autor, descobri-o no site Poem of the Week. Lindo.)

Résumé, de Dorothy Parker

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren't lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.

Messy Room

Whosever room this is should be ashamed!
His underwear is hanging on the lamp.
His raincoat is there in the overstuffed chair,
And the chair is becoming quite mucky and damp.
His workbook is wedged in the window,
His sweater's been thrown on the floor.
His scarf and one ski are beneath the TV,
And his pants have been carelessly hung on the door.
His books are all jammed in the closet,
His vest has been left in the hall.
A lizard named Ed is asleep in his bed,
And his smelly old sock has been stuck to the wall.
Whosever room this is should be ashamed!
Donald or Robert or Willie or--
Huh? You say it's mine? Oh, dear,
I knew it looked familiar!

Shel Silverstein